This title by Malcolm Torry, Director of the Citizen’s Basic income Trust and longstanding advocate of the idea of a citizen’s income (hereafter, basic income), is an updated edition of his 2013 book, Money For Everyone. The revisions are comprehensive, reflecting the way that the debate has moved on in the past few years. Chapters have been reorganised and rationalised, from 17 to 12 in number. There is more focus on issues around feasibility and implementation, including illustrative microsimulation modelling. These are welcome additions; as Torry acknowledges, these issues – rather than whether and why a basic income might be desirable in the abstract – now motivate much serious enquiry around basic income.

The book contains the hallmarks of Torry’s scholarship and advocacy, reflecting his personal observations on the complex and intrusive nature of conditional benefits, and the way that the burdens of bureaucratic complexity falls on the purported beneficiaries of the system in the form of insecurity and instability. The volume is replete with depictions of the economic, social and psychological impacts of income insecurity, and how the latter affects people’s capacities to obtain employment, take risks, and escape poverty. Chapter one evocatively sketches a series of scenarios that illustrate some of the abundant problems of the welfare system.

Torry’s relentless concern with the messiness of people’s real lives, and the ways in which they jar with the rigid presumptions of our current welfare system, is commendable. On the latter, the book contains an impressive level of historical detail on the gradual, path-dependent evolution of UK welfare policy. This is crucial, because it enables us to learn important lessons from history as to the likely determinants of the feasibility of different types of reform, which are pertinent to advocates of such a wide-ranging reform as the introduction of a basic income. Significantly, these lessons shape Torry’s own proposals or preferred schemes, to the extent that he views basic income as an addition to, rather than a replacement of, the existing welfare system (pp. 26–27). Torry’s vision of basic income is not radical and utopian, but instead modest and pragmatic in outlook. Compared to many basic income advocates, who neglect the issues altogether, it is most welcome that Torry is alive to concerns such as institutional ‘fit’, political constraints and the dynamics of welfare reform processes.

In the next four chapters, Torry expands upon the arguments in favour of basic income. Chapters three and four are devoted to how the changing realities of the economy and labour market, and family forms, respectively work in favour of a basic income. These are familiar argument to anyone involved in the debate: work is becoming more precarious and family forms more fluid; basic income is optimally flexible to any circumstance in either sphere. Turning to the labour market arguments in chapter three, basic income tackles poverty and unemployment traps caused by high marginal deduction rates and also, crucially, from the chilling effects of bureaucratic complexity and claim delays. As Torry recognises, a basic income could facilitate a more optimal balance of paid and unpaid work, enable people to engage more dynamically with emerging labour market opportunities, and encourage investments in skill development. All of these features of basic income could indeed serve to enhance the efficiency of the labour market, as well as protecting individuals when it fails. As chapter four depicts, basic income is also more appropriate for the circumstances of modern families, with more complex work and care patterns, and more frequent changes of composition. Existing benefits, calculated at the household level, contribute to intra-household and gendered power imbalances – and, at the same time, can actually discourage partnering and penalise family formation. Also in this chapter, Torry argues that means testing encourages the stigmatisation of benefit recipients by “ascribing their being in that situation to their weakness of character” (p. 59). This may be so, but it is interesting that Torry’s own preferred ‘all at once’ scheme would do very little to reduce ‘stigma’ on these terms, and could increase it for those unfortunate enough to remain entangled in the means-tested system.

Chapter five covers arguments around the administrative efficiency of basic income. The basic argument is that entitlement rules and the treatment of alternative sources of income and wealth vary between different tax-benefit policies, resulting in complexity and incoherence. Basic income, Torry contends, would make the system simpler and more coherent, because it lacks entitlement conditions (or any that require monitoring), and fewer people would be required to engage with the more complex policies. Again, the focus is (commendably) on the individuals for whom the welfare system is intended, rather than the administrative burden on the state (p. 71), but there is also a discussion of the implications of greater parsimony, in terms of error, fraud and crimes such as non-declaration of earnings.

Chapter six looks at arguments that we might expect a basic income to alleviate poverty and reduce inequality. Torry finds the concept of income poverty restrictive and flawed; nevertheless, as he accepts, “the consequences of abandoning it would probably be worse than the consequences of keeping it” (p. 83). Torry’s dissatisfaction of the measurement of poverty in income terms – which is reminiscent of the views of those on the political right who oppose redistribution more generally – may be coloured by the fact that, by these narrow measures, targeting appears clearly superior in its effects to basic income. However, basic income becomes more desirable when we also consider the ‘root causes’ of poverty, such as disincentive traps, stigmatisation and lack of security – as well as the symptoms (inadequate income) themselves. By the same token, Torry defends a certain degree of inequality and states that redistribution is only justified and indeed possible if redistributive policies also “improve the efficiency of a market economy” (p. 88). Torry is more concerned with redistributing the ability to raise one’s net income than he is about the redistribution of income per se. In any case, the chapter concludes that basic income could conceivably reduce poverty and inequality (measured in conventional terms) as well.

Chapter seven covers Torry’s take on the issue of feasibility. He usefully identifies this as a multi-faceted issue, but it is arguably treated rather superficially in this volume. For example, Torry claims that political feasibility is determined by the question “would the idea cohere with existing political ideologies?” (p. 93). This is a rather limiting way to think about things; we know (and of course Torry acknowledges) that under the basic income ‘umbrella’, specific schemes vary greatly. So the possibility emerges that each of the political ideologies cohere with their own specific ideas about basic income, but that they do not cohere jointly around any single idea about how to implement the policy in terms of concrete design features. Furthermore, Torry claims that “every mainstream political ideology, and proponents of these ideologies, would be able to find reasons to support the implementation of a basic income; and that any arguments against implementation would not be related to those political ideologies”. But this simply does not follow; it is perfectly possible (and in fact is arguably the case) both that every mainstream political ideology can find reasons to support a basic income, while at the same time, that they can find other – and perhaps politically more salient – reasons not to support a basic income.

Chapter eight look at some possible specific implementation methods or schemes. The schemes are evaluated according to realistic criteria, with an eye on the practical feasibility issues identified in the previous chapter. Torry is not naïve here, but provides some cause for cautious optimism for some incremental steps towards basic income in the medium term. Thinking more about concrete steps towards basic income’s realisation, chapter nine provides an overview of some existing empirical evidence from pilots and experiments, and assesses the prospects of similar efforts being attempted in the UK.

Chapter ten sketches and refutes some of the most common objections to the basic income idea. This is a welcome addition to the book, and Torry expertly dispatches a number of unjustified criticisms of the basic income proposal. One area that Torry’s analysis is on less secure ground is in the realm of labour market incentives. Here, Torry’s confidence that “people would be more likely to seek employment, not less” (p. 152) is unwarranted, at least in my reading of the evidence. While it might be true that wages in poorly-paid occupations could rise, the opposite could also happen, depending upon the supply and demand conditions in specific segments of the labour market. Payroll tax rates would rise significantly, and large numbers of people with strong preferences for ‘leisure’ (students, those nearing retirement, parents with caring responsibilities) might – at the margins – choose to exit the labour market entirely. There is also a possibility of rather undesirable effects on gender equality, through the exacerbation of existing imbalances in the distribution of paid work and caring responsibilities, an issue that is scarcely acknowledged here. More generally, there is an implicit assumption throughout the book that earning additional income will be relatively easy for most people, in the absence of the bureaucratic traps that discourage them from doing so, and that basic income would strengthen the hand of the least powerful workers. But, in the context of imperfect labour markets and structural inequalities, there will still be people whose marginal productivity falls below the prevailing wage rate. Basic income could indeed have a depressing effect on wages under such circumstances. Individuals who experience labour market marginalisation might hardly be better off with a modest partial basic income. They would either face the same bureaucratic intrusion into their lives for a smaller financial reward (in terms of the additional money gained by involvement with the means-tested, conditional JSA), or they might be financially worse off, ‘settling’ for the smaller unconditional payment given the bureaucratic effort involved in accessing the conditional ‘top-up’.

Chapter eleven covers alternatives to basic income. Here, Torry helpfully compares basic income to three ‘cognate’ policies – tax credits, negative income tax, and participation income. Torry finds these alternatives inferior to basic income, in large part due to their administrative complexity. However, these types of scheme have potential political advantages that are not explored here; likewise the restoration of the contributory principle in welfare delivery. Other radical alternatives – such as a job guarantee – are discussed only rather briefly. ‘Mainstream’ social policy alternatives (e.g. universal public childcare, and the expansion of ‘capacitating’ services more generally) are only mentioned in passing, to note that these options are perfectly compatible with a basic income. While in principle this is correct, nevertheless given fiscal constraints and political resistance to tax rises, any policy that requires a significant increase in public spending must been seen as an alternative to basic income, at least in the current political climate. In this context, it warrants careful consideration whether advocating a basic income – rather than other progressive policy instruments that come at lower cost and with less entrenched normative opposition – is the most effective use of political capital.

The remainder of the book comprises a brief summary chapter and an expansive appendix exploring two of Torry’s preferred illustrative schemes in depth. Microsimulation techniques provide fine-grained evidence of positive distributional outcomes, although Torry perhaps downplays the shortcomings of his ‘all at once’ scheme, which does not – in my judgement – do much to streamline the welfare system, and which fails to liberate large numbers of the poorest and most disadvantaged from its intrusive conditionality.

With this volume, Torry has produced another accessible introduction to the core debates surrounding basic income. He provides a nuanced and convincing account of how policy design and implementation issues could play out in practice, while at the same time acknowledging real limits and barriers to feasibility. The book is underpinned by high-quality scholarship throughout, and will appeal especially to those studying or otherwise interested in UK social policy.